James Cracknell blames his brain injury for his divorce.

James Cracknell

James Cracknell

The 'Strictly Come Dancing' hopeful separated from Beverley Turner but insists the end of their marriage is to do with his personality altering brain injury, which he sustained during a nasty cycling accident in 2010.

He said: "I would have left me a long time before we split. I don't think I would have stuck it with me as long as she did. Bev had it really hard. She had one husband for the first eight years we were married and a very, very different one for the rest. Maybe I didn't take it them [the marital problems] seriously enough, and there were improvements that I should have made. I thought that riding out the storm would be OK. The reality is that when I started to think, 'OK, I really need to do something here,' Bev had already put so much effort in that she was understandably done. It's difficult when you've got three children. It's difficult to find the time to talk and if you don't open up and show how you're really feeling - which is what I was doing - then it's hard to live in that situation."

And whilst both sides of the couple made effort to make it work, James admit it was at different times and it just didn't "coincide" how he'd hoped.

He told the Mail on Sunday newspaper: "If I am totally honest and were to ask if either of us were the best versions of ourselves, I would say no. I think I was a better version of me in the last year of our marriage and Bev was the best version of herself in the two years before, which wasn't ideal. We put in the effort, nobody more than her, but unfortunately they didn't coincide. That was bad planning on my part."

James' crash in 2010 left him with a fractured skull, which caused both a brain injury and epilepsy. He also says his temperament, memory and concentration was all affected by the accident.


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